Peter M. Ball
Greetings all. Happy Monday…or at least as happy a Monday as you can have. I’ve got a guest today, Peter M Ball, and he’s going to talk a little about his Flotsam trilogy of novellas. I didn’t so much as discover these awesome stories as I did have them thrust upon me by Jennifer Brozek, asking me if I’d give them an “author blurb.” I don’t get those often, and I know Jennifer has great taste in fiction, so I read the first Flotsam story, Exiled…and loved it. And then the waiting set in… sigh.
Well, now all three stories are available, and so I decided to ask Jennifer if Peter would like to do a guest post on my website. He agreed. I did a little happy dance. Things I like about the Flotsam stories:
They are urban fantasy set in Australia. I’m always down for stories in places that don’t get much love in urban fantasy.
The supernatural world is scary and creepy. Unlike some other Urban fantasy worlds, where it seems more focused on adventure and snark, these stories have a more-than-healthy dose of Lovecraftian “WFT???” factor going on. This is a supernatural world where you’re thinking, “I want that to leave me the hell alone,” rather than, “Where do I sign up.”
Moral gray. Love me stories that explore the area between good and evil, and oh man, do these stories deliver on that.
Peter has a backstory for the creation of the stories that fits right in with the creepiness of the stories themselves. I love little details like this.
Well, that’s enough from me.I’ll let Peter himself tell you about his journey with these stories…
The Curse
Here’s a thing I haven’t talked about publicly, when it comes to the Flotsam series: I’m nearly, almost one hundred percent, convinced that it was cursed. Even as I type this post, ostensibly to promote the book, I’m basically giving the world around me the ol’ shifty-eye, waiting for something bad to happen.
The good news: it hasn’t happened yet. I may even get to the end of this, before the inevitable tragedy occurs, but it’s definitely coming. It always does, every time I work on the project. Flotsam and bad news are intrinsically intertwined.
For example, way back in latter half of 2010, I pitched the original idea for Flotsam to Jennifer Brozek for the Edge of Propinquity zine. One year of serialized stories, all set in the same world, about a supernatural hitman who specialized in monsters and what happened when he completely messed up a job.
The same day I got the email letting me know Jennifer would be interested, I got the news that my father was in hospital after having a heart attack. I ended up skyping with Jennifer, agreeing to the project, then jumped in a car and rushed to the Gold Coast where my dad was getting the news that heart surgery was in his future.
He came through it okay and made it home by Christmas, so I figured, well, that’s done, then. Time to go write these stories.
I didn’t know about the curse, yet. I didn’t actually believe in curses, back then.
Then 2011 happened and…well, it wasn’t good. There were deaths in the family and jobs that went crazy and a day spent trapped in an airport by a cyclone. My dad’s health took a turn for the worse again, which meant more trips down to the Gold Coast from Brisbane. I had some weird health stuff going on. I kept sending the team of Edge of Propinquity apologetic emails: Sorry the story is late this month, but you know how I swore things couldn’t get any worse…
I spent December 31st hiding under the covers, giving the world the ol’ shifty-eye. Well, I thought, at least that’s over.
Then, sometime in 2013, Jennifer Brozek emailed me again. She’d started a publishing company, Apocalypse Ink, and she was interested in doing trilogies of novellas. Would I be interested in revisiting Flotsam in some way, transforming it into a series?
Sure, I said. I’m sure things will be better this time. No such thing as curses, after all, and I can make up for all those times I was late.
Little did I know, it had nothing to do with the year.
I dropped my laptop the same day I was due to submit the first book, Exile. Realized I hadn’t backed up my computer in a little over two weeks. Twenty-thousand words lost and another apologetic email, along with the sinking realization that there is no professional way of explaining to an editor that they won’t be getting their manuscript ‘cause you broke your computer without sounding like a moron.
The second novella, Frost, had all sorts of problems, from lost USB drives to work projects that ate my life, in addition to the bad habit I’d developed where I fell asleep, at the keyboard, halfway through typing a word. I had friends who started making jokes about narcolepsy. Rewriting and editing were a bastard on that one, ‘cause I kept finding these sections where I’d obviously dozed off and started transcribing any random thing that was going on around me.
There was some good news: my laptop didn’t die this time. But I did kill the work computer I wrote on during lunch-breaks, which got me thinking real hard about cracking wise on matters of Flotsam and curses for a while. .
I got real nervous about writing the third book in the series. Crusade was always going to be tough – after two books of build-up, it was time to finally deliver on the promise I’d made way back in Exile. It was time to bring Ragnarok to the city of the Gold Coast (an Australian city with aspirations to be either Vegas or Miami, although the Gold Coast secretly thinks those cities are far too classy).
It’s hard to destroy the world, in the space of a novella. It’s harder, when it finally sinks in, that you’re no longer joking around about curses.
So I hunkered down in my apartment and typed like a madman, backing up every six or seven minutes, ‘cause I was determined that nothing go wrong this time. Just this once, I’d get the story over with and nothing at all would go wrong.
I fell asleep a lot, while I was doing that. At the keyboard. At work. Once, pretty close to the deadline, I dozed off in my car while I was stopped at a traffic light. I went to a sleep clinic and had a bunch of tests. Turns out, I was suffering from Chronic Sleep Apnea.
Oh, I said. I’ve heard of that. It’s not that big a deal, right?
You stop breathing in your sleep, the clinic told me. About seventy times an hour. You fell asleep while driving a car.
Well, sure, I said, doing the math. If you put it like that…
I went home and wrote. And wrote. And wrote.
This time my laptop – the one bought to replace the one I’d dropped – died two weeks ahead of the deadline. My desktop went down a few days later.
Hard drive failure, the tech-guy said. Thank god I’d learned my lesson when it came to back-ups.
The rational part of me looks back at all the bad things that happened and says it’s just coincidence, but let’s be honest: writers are rarely the most rational of people. If we were, there’s a pretty good chance we’d find saner uses for our time than writing.
Besides, I’d do it again.
If you had a time machine and you went back in time and you warned bad things were coming. If you told me, straight up, you’re going to write this thing, and disaster will plague you it every step, well, there’s every chance my first response would be: bring it on.
‘Cause even with all the stuff that went wrong, I got to tell the story I really wanted to tell. I got to work with the crew at Apocalypse Ink, which has been all kinds of awesome. I got to see Mark Ferarri’s cover art for the three novellas, which was awesome, his cover art for the print compilation, which is mind-bendingly brilliant and has been my desktop image ever since I first saw it.
And for all that there’s definitely something wrong when you fall asleep while driving a car, it’s actually the impact on deadlines and writing that actually got me to go see a doctor and figure out what was going wrong when the apnea was at its worst.
Writers are mad, that way. We get obsessed with the stories and the words and the people, and we forget about the bad stuff by the time we hit the end.
And maybe it all turns out good, in the end, and maybe it all goes wrong for them. But it’s always worth it. Always. That’s the promise you make, right
We can’t help it. It’s wired into the way we do our jobs. You take some perfectly nice people and you rain all kinds of hell down on them. You shoot them and curse them and put them through the end of the world.there in the beginning, and it’s your job to do every damn thing you can to make sure you deliver by the time you hit The End.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to head off, ‘cause this computer is making unhealthy noises and I’d rather not push my luck…
I’ll have reviews up as soon as I give Peter’s stories a second read through. In the meantime, you can find Peter all over the Internet. Follow him, like him, read the stories, spread the word.
